What are the most popular misconceptions you have seen in IM

Just telling the misconceptions as they pop up in my head:

• autoblogging works
• duplicate content
• buying junk CB products to "learn"
• thinking that filling surveys has anything to do with the IM
• Ponzi schemes
• asking for AdSense clicks
• lying & cheating to make money
• supposing your clients are idiots / computer robots with credit cards
• coming to the WF and making your first post like "hey, buy my stuff, it's great!"

I could probably go on, but I think that's enough...

That you can just jump online and start making money without actually doing the work. There are countless people now trying to do internet marketing. A lot of internet marketers are taking complete advantage of this mentality and so there are countless advertisements for systems where you have to do completely nothing and become instantly rich. If people stopped with these lies, internet marketing might be able to develop a better image to people who don't know about it and everyone won't automatically think that everything internet marketing related in a scam

No, perhaps not ... but there are surely some areas of commercial life in which objectivity and certainty are more readily ascertainable, less open to interpretation, and far less susceptible to being distorted by people with financial and/or emotional incentives of their own to propagate and perpetuate delusional beliefs?

The specific relevance/interest of this, to me, in this context and in this location, is that there are some people trying to brand themselves - in their usernames and/or signature-files - as "SEO/IM experts" who are grotesquely misinforming beginners - sometimes even about the most self-evident and logically demonstrable things - in exactly the ways that prevented me from earning a living for a few months when I started off. One isn't allowed to say so too openly, nor aggressively at all, in any specific case, and obviously I accept that and understand the reasons for it.

I admit, though, that I do have an extravagant enthusiasm for advising beginners, when encountering conflicting views on complicated subjects of which they themselves very reasonably have little understanding/exerience, to examine the motives of the various parties purporting to inform them, to look at who they are and what they're selling/promoting, and generally to ask themselves whether the participants in any discussion have a fairly obvious financial or emotional incentive not only to say what they say, but to believe what they believe, too. It seems to me that this is both an unobjectionable and a potentially helpful thing to do, so I sometimes do it, with apologies to anyone who winces at it.

To summarise that in simple English, by a little example: when someone who's promoting "spinning software" misinforms people factually about the benefits of spinning software, it's sometimes easier to find a relatively polite way of saying "You're talking cr@p" than it is to say "You're selling spinning software", because one approach is far more overtly integrity-impugning than the other. I probably didn't pick the greatest example here, I acknowledge, but you see what I mean.

So true.

Most of my life, my dad thought I was gay...

Three grand kids later, he still thought I was gay...

LOL

Then people kept bugging me in the WF to change my picture, because they said, "That picture makes you look gay."

So I updated my picture...

Then I said...

What does it matter if I look gay to you... As long as I am not trying to get into your pants... Why do you care?

ROFLMAO

Alexa: Let me be clear.... You are pedantic!!!

If you keep using that word, I might ought to go look it up.

The most common misconception is almost definitely the amount of time and work you have to put in.
Creating good keywords, writing quality articles, learning about SEO and affiliate marketing strategies, creating an enticing blog/website.. all of these things take time and effort, and if you're not ready for that, then it will be hard to succeed.

Sad but true.

But at least there are people out there that are trying to get the word out. And I'm glad I got the skinny on duplicate content early in the game.

This is very good advice.

I speak as someone who outsourced quite a bit of stuff to India at far too early a stage (albeit very successfully, as it turned out: I got lucky there), and in a way I'm paying the price for it now, and have realised that in the long run I might have been much better off learning to do most of it for myself ... which I'm gradually trying to correct, but the longer you leave it, in some ways, the harder it is to correct it.

Exactly as you say, you need to know what to do, what works and why. You don't learn so much of this if you outsource at too early a stage. And if you're less lucky than I was, it usually doesn't even work anyway, because you don't know how to outsource.